Xi'an BiangBiang Noodles (Aldgate East)
The belt noodles are pulled by hand in the open kitchen and come out so long that Time Out's reviewer dared anyone to pick up a whole one with chopsticks without cutting it first (Time Out).
Why go
Shaanxi cooking is still thin on the ground in Britain. The Picky Glutton put the position plainly in 2018: this is a rare find in a city and a nation where Cantonese and watered-down anglicised derivations are still the norm for Chinese food
2. What this room does about it is one technique, done in front of you, all day.
Tania Ballantine gave the address four stars for Time Out and named the order: They're hand-pulled in the open kitchen, then slathered with any number of sauces and toppings, all delicious. Best of the lot has to be the beef and chilli.
On the chilli she is specific about how it works, and it is the sentence that explains the cooking: The heat doesn't just smack you in the face, it builds slowly, like a piece of music
1.
This branch makes one dish that no other branch does. The thin hand-pulled noodles in the special sesame sauce are, in her words, "both rich and light, with a milky nuttiness and a fragrance you feel you could inhale."
The cold starters are what a cook would order first. Black fungus in a chilled vinegar-and-herb dressing, and shredded chicken with celery and scallion, both built to cut through everything that arrives after.
The room is a bright canteen with a television on and drinks in a chiller, and this is one of four branches under the same name.
Order this / avoid
- Order: biang biang with beef and chilli. Cold skin noodles in the house special sauce, chilled and vinegary. The black fungus and the shredded chicken before the noodles land. The thin noodles in sesame sauce, since this branch is the only one making them.
- Avoid: the sesame version of the cold skin noodles, which the Picky Glutton found cloying enough to name in his skip list. The Cantonese and anglicised dishes padding out the menu, which both critics flag.
What locals & experts say
- Tania Ballantine, Time Out London, 31 January 2019, four stars and Recommended:
They're hand-pulled in the open kitchen, then slathered with any number of sauces and toppings, all delicious.
And the criticism, which she put in the same review:Only the service, which varied wildly from friendly and helpful to brusque and indifferent, needs work. And don't expect sophistication either: this is a drinks-in-the-chiller-TV-screen-overhead kind of a place.
1 - The Picky Glutton, 6 August 2018, three stars out of five, across several visits:
Thick and wide with roughly hewn edges and a smooth surface, the biang biang noodles were consistently springy then tender across all my visits.
His verdict is harder than his noodle notes:At times though, this restaurant feels as if it's coasting on its rarefied status as one of the few eateries in London serving Shaanxi food,
with fifteen-minute waits to order and dishes arriving at the wrong tables.2 - SquareMeal's venue record, January 2019: the kitchen
specialises in hand-pulled 'belt' noodles, covered in umami-rich Sichuan pepper corn, soya-based, chilli sauces
, topped withChinese greens, braised beef or cumin-spiced lamb.
4 - Nothing since January 2019. Searched on 1 August 2026 for a recent review of this address and for a chef pick across all 622 records in the London vote graph. The Infatuation has reviewed the Covent Garden branch and that is a different premises, so it is left out. Two seven-year-old verdicts are carrying this entry.
Good to know
- Where: 62 Wentworth Street, E1 7AL, at the Petticoat Lane end of Spitalfields. Aldgate East is the tube, which is where the branch name comes from.
- Timing: the group publishes one set of hours for all four branches: 11.30am to 10.30pm Monday to Thursday, to 11pm Friday, noon to 11pm Saturday, noon to 10pm Sunday, with last orders half an hour before close.
- Booking: walk-in. This is the big room of the group, so it usually absorbs a queue that the smaller Shaanxi kitchens in London cannot.
- Sites: four, all under this name. Aldgate East is the branch on this page. Covent Garden is 36 Wellington Street WC2E 7BD, London Bridge is 35 Railway Approach SE1 9SS, Gloucester Road is 29-35 Gloucester Road SW7 4PL. Each has its own hygiene record, and the sesame-sauce thin noodles are this branch's alone.
- Ownership: unresolved. Time Out, SquareMeal and the Picky Glutton all described this in 2018 and 2019 as a spin-off of Xi'an Impression in Holloway. Guirong Wei, who opened Xi'an Impression, has since published her own account of the rooms she runs, and this one is absent from it. No current link is claimed here.
- Hygiene: FSA rating 5, Tower Hamlets, inspected 2 September 2025, FHRSID 1037485.5
- Diet: unestablished. Time Out records a meat-free version of the signature noodles, and the venue publishes no vegetarian, vegan or allergen wording, so no flag is claimed.
Verdict
could-visit — Go if you are near Aldgate East, and go for one thing. The biang biang noodle is hand-pulled in the open kitchen and comes out wide enough that Tania Ballantine, reviewing this address for Time Out at four stars, dared anyone to lift a whole one with chopsticks. She rated the beef and chilli the best of the lot and described the heat building slowly rather than landing all at once. The Picky Glutton, over multiple visits in 2018, found the same noodles consistently springy then tender, and pointed out what makes the room matter: Shaanxi food is still rare in a city where Cantonese and anglicised Chinese cooking are the default. The cold dishes are the surprise, and the thin noodles in sesame sauce are made at this branch and nowhere else in the group. It stops at could-visit for two reasons and they are both about evidence rather than about the noodle. Both critics marked the service down hard, independently, seven years apart in the same room, and one of them wrote that the place felt like it was coasting on being one of the few Shaanxi kitchens in London. And nothing dated after January 2019 assesses this address, while the operator has opened three more branches since. A four-site group carries the burden of proof on edge, and on current evidence it is not discharged here.